This speaks to me. So much of our life circumstances are beyond our control (parents, genetics, geography, society, wider economy, etc.) It's humbling, how much of our success or failure is influenced by pure chance.
On the other hand, many things attributed to chance are actually the aggregate effect of other people's choices. If we make choices based on not just what's best for ourselves but what's best for all of us, we will all suddenly become more "lucky". And vice versa, if we only think about ourselves that luck will diminish.
I was thinking something very similar as I read the letter and hear people talk about luck in a similar way. I think attributing things to luck, while seemingly humble, can be dismissive and/or simplistic. Yes, we're all lucky to be in our situations -- living in this time, fed, privileged. Though, whether this luck is experienced positively or not is entirely subjective. Also, to ascribe our given situation to luck dismisses the concerted efforts of all living things of this time and past that have guided us to our current situation -- once again, without qualifying it as good or bad. It is almost disabling in it's message. The flip side is that many things happened that were dreamed, planned, intended, and carried out to land us in our situation. This to me feels more empowering, hopeful, appreciative, and also responsible than casting off as merely luck.
I was searching for what to answer people who attribute everything I’ve done to luck. There’s the classic “It’s strange because the more I work the more I’m lucky”, but that’s very condescending. Thank you for offering me a positive alternative. In a sense it makes me owe work to my society.
If you accept that the world is not "just" (just-world-fallacy), then you will also believe that rewards are indeterministic. It follows that rewards are attributed to luck, while effort and results are (by definition) not.
There is no accusation of dishonesty in this argument, and no need to feel accused of scamming.
(One point is that people who persist longer, receive more awards because the "area" under their luck-curve is larger. And people who have lots bad luck in the beginning get discouraged and stop trying ...)
That's a nice point. A society where everyone makes everything just a little bit better for the next random person will be a society full of nice surprises, rather than nasty ones.
Western Europe (not only) social system is based on such belief. It kept working till a lot of immigrants from pretty bad corrupted countries came in, abusing the system in ways it wasn't planned for.
Couldn't agree more. Many (most?) of our opportunities are afforded by the family, community and society in which we grew up. Of course individual talent and choices make a difference, but it's my feeling that many people wildly underestimate how much their external life circumstances contribute to their success or happiness. In fairness, it goes against our sense of self-efficacy.
Like a lot of things recently, it reminds me again of Timothy Snyder's book On Freedom. I think the world would be on a much better path if more people took its core message to heart: that your "freedom" in how to lead your life is not just an absence of oppression, but something made possible for you by an entire society collaborating on giving others these opportunities, by maintaining infrastructure, education, emergency services, etc. etc.
I like the thought experiment of considering how much of your current life's comforts and liberties you would still have if you lived as a hermit in the woods. Nobody tells you what to do there, but you'd quickly find out how much your luck depended on society.
Being able to buy my food at the supermarket instead of having to go hunt and forage for it every day gives me a lot of additional energy and time to exercise other freedoms.
What are you trying to say with this, that you disagree, or that it's an intelligent perspective afforded to those who are not hopeless? I don't see how anyone can disagree that the aggregate actions of your parents, your locality, your culture, your nation, play the largest role in the cards you are dealt from the beginning.
I think the point is that this only works in the aggregate. Individuals in a group/organization/society can make small positive decisions that improve the likelihood that any individual in that same group will get "lucky".
There's a sort of "freeloader" problem, though, which is that the ones who get "lucky" don't themselves have to be making positive choices. In fact, being a selfish individual in a group of generous ones can be an easy way to get ahead - as long as you can get away with it without being noticed or punished.
I read it as in alignment with the previous definition of luck; meaning that a number of previous conscious decisions have created a world where they could come to this understanding of luck
While strictly true, I wonder what does this sentence generates in the minds of the readers.
I personally would prefer other formulations, because while I agree with the core, I think this idea should just reduce frustration if you don't succeed, while I am afraid it can be used as an excuse for not trying.
Yes, you need luck, but if you never get out of your room/street/neighborhood/city/country, you might have less opportunities for luck than otherwise.
Right. I would say the most apt analogy is from poker.
In Poker, luck plays an integral role in the outcome of any specific game or match, but skill does show up when collected over a large enough sample (that's why they say you can't prove something is due to skill over chance until you've collected a sample of 10,000 - 100,000 played hands of poker - at least if you're playing online).
You could also be a very good poker player and have bad luck on one important occasion (say in the finals of the WSOP), where the outcome hinges purely on luck. Similarly, you could be a subpar player and "luck out" and strike it big purely because of the right sequence of cards at a big event. But generally, most people who succeed at Poker are not there purely based on luck; you can be lucky once or twice, but you're unlikely to make it through a whole Poker career just by being lucky.
I think similarly in life - you have a certain hand you're dealt, and if you play it to the best of your ability (and make opportunities for yourself), you increase your odds of winning the hand / the tournament / life; but ultimately even with your best efforts the outcome could still be decided by luck.
"I'm a greater believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it." - Thomas Jefferson
There's lots of similar quotes throughout time, all about what you say in your list line: to be lucky you need to create as many opportunities as possible to get lucky. You can't win at dice if you never roll them.
Precisely. "Luck" shouldn't be equivocated with "chance." We have two words for a reason.
Show up + embrace awkwardness + be kind and courteous and luck will follow.
My son's Scout troop was lucky this year. They just sold more than $60k worth of pop-corn in two weeks. How? Each kid walked up to hundreds of complete strangers at grocery stores and asked politely - albeit awkwardly sometimes. The exponentially lower-success approach is to sit behind a table waiting for people to hand you money.
The result? Almost 40 lucky kids get 11 all-expenses-paid camping trips and a fun summer camp all for just eight hours of walking and talking. Doesn't matter how much money their families make; every kid gets to fully participate.
What a cynical and dismissive take, of no value to anyone.
Are you saying that no one of color in that era made any worthwhile contribution to the world? Or are you saying that every white person of the era should hold themselves to the standard of achievement of Thomas Jefferson since that is the power of the privilege they held?
I can see it being reasonable to assume the ROI of hard work while in shackles to be insufficient. Well, at least hard work that does not involve getting violent against the shacklers.
For example, would slave women have done the hard work of having and raising slave children if they had the agency to not have them?
Would you work hard at doing something that doesn't scale if you know the federal government will simply reduce the purchasing power of your earnings to maintain asset owners' position in society?
Does it make sense to work hard if there is a high likelihood you will never own land, and hence will always have increasing portions of your winnings taken by a rent seeker? Seems like a bad trade.
There is truth in saying working harder does seem to generate more luck, in so far as, if you lay in your room all day and did nothing, you won't be getting any luck.
It's just silly to paint yourself as this hard worker that got back what you put in, whilst ignoring the ills that you put in. I'm sure he did good stuff because of work he personally did, but it's laughable to think he could get to where he did, if he wasn't born into the planter class.
And no, that doesn't mean if you were culturally disadvantaged you couldn't do anything, it's just a lot harder and you had no free will in that. Every opportunity (and decision, really) is just a consequence of where and when you are, and should be taken not as a personal character assessment. I guess you could argue that means Jefferson is morally fine because that's just the kinda life he was born into so how would he know different, or maybe he just lacks some empathy :P
Of course less famous people also had good work ethics we just don’t have their quotes immortalized.
So all you’ve really done is subsumed any discussion of the merits of the idea itself into a hand-wringing fest about privilege that was inevitable from the beginning and could equally apply to any famous quote from history. I really don’t see the value in this kind of hand-wringing.
I think it's not prepared. More like a willingness to be open to possibilities. Preparation assume you know something good is coming and can prepare now to face it. Those kind of events are probably not that life changing. Of course there are exceptions.
But best things in life come from opportunities that you cannot prepare for in advance. Just willingness to accept it.
Perhaps pedantic, but "prepared mind" includes your meaning. Prepared may mean being equipped with a skill that meets the moments, but flexibility, acceptance and optimism are also skills of a prepared mind.
It's why the quote has survived since 1854.
> "dans les champs de l'observation, le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés" ("In the field of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind")
I don't think it is pedantic at all. A prepared mind is exactly what is needed to take advantage of opportunity. Prepared mentally denotes a state of mind where you are actively looking for opportunities and that allows you to notice them. It is an attitude, really. Not unlike being a Stoic is an attitude on gratefulness of life and acceptance of death.
I used to think the same (and still have regrets about missed opportunities, ie sleepwalking them). But then I think that I'm probably disregarding some other opportunities that I did take and just forgot about them because "For it falls out That what we have we prize not to the worth ..."
But however you want to spin it, there’s still the underlying luck, that you survived until that moment, that you were able to reach that place and that you were free to venture there are all inputs you didn’t have much or any control over. There’s no shame in it. I’ve achieved a good deal in a half century of life and much of it was via hard work and guile, but I do tend to think of myself as lucky because, even as a middle-class kid back when the US had that, where my starting blocks were placed on the track was far enough ahead of the bulk of the pack that these things became achievable.
I like to call it "Exposing yourself to luck." You can't win lottery if you never play. Play the lottery with the best odds and play it as much as you can.
I think it’s just trying to be exposed to as many opportunities as possible with the best tools you can have. You can’t determine whether or not you can catch a fish, but you can acquire the best fish-catching tools you can get, try to get to the fullest river, and stay out there as long as you can. I think the role of “luck” really hits when you realize how some people are born on the side of the river with a gigantic, well-made net.
You won't always be right but you can be there often enough to matter. goals need to be reasoneble - the luck needed to be a billionair is unlikely, but if you settle for millionair that luck is likely if you invest your money in the right place.
Yeah, and it's kinda depressing how hard it is to get people to accept that. Every community and group seems to operate under the assumption that anyone who's not 'successful' is too lazy or selfish to deserve it, and that those who are winning have to be the smartest, hardest working people around.
The just world fallacy is strong in communities, especially for artistic and creative endeavours like writing, art, music, filmmaking, game design, etc.
Does that mean that effort is worthless? Of course not. Does that mean you should just say "well, I'm not successful, I guess that's just life?". Again no.
But you do need to be humble and accept that in some ways, both your successes and failures were affected by external factors as well as your own efforts. That for how tempting it is to look down at people, that it could just have well have been your life circumstances that didn't work out well, your bets that didn't pay off and your efforts that didn't amount to anything in the end.
Best only to worry about what you can control, no? If there are external and internal factors to your success then you should spend 100% of your time focusing on the internal ones, since these are the only ones where productive gains can be made.
Also, the research is in. Grit is the single biggest predictor of economic success. Anyone who is lacking in economic success can be reasonably assumed to lack grit. Whether you label that “lazy” or not is semantics.
It's wild how much of what we chalk up to merit is really just the invisible scaffolding of luck: being born in the right place, with the right wiring, at the right time...
If things generally worked out very well for you, it feels good to believe you got there because of your virtues, and that those who didn’t got there because of their vices.
While I do agree with your opinion, I think the opposite is also true. It feels good to believe you didn't get there because "The game is rigged", "You have to be born lucky", "The house always wins", etc, etc. This defeatist/powerless way of thinking may in fact make it worse for you. When hope is lost, what's left?
That is what all societies are finding out right now. Before, they could count on women having babies providing a need to hope, but now that children are optional, societies don’t seem to have a replacement mechanism.
There's certainly an element of luck. But every individual, no matter how unlucky their circumstances, has the opportunity to make good or bad choices from that starting point. It is not like people are powerless victims of the unlucky birth they had.
A person born in a war torn country who is killed at a young age doesn't get much opportunity for good or bad choices. That's what I think of regarding bad luck.
>the invisible scaffolding of luck: being born in the right place, with the right wiring, at the right time...
That seems overly dismissive of the contribution of our ancestors, fighting against entropy, who paid it forward to their offspring, creating the civilization we now inherit.
> According to this view, justice demands that variations in how well-off people are should be wholly determined by the responsible choices people make and not by differences in their unchosen circumstances. Luck egalitarianism expresses that it is a bad thing for some people to be worse off than others through no fault of their own.
When I see this line of reasoning, it leads me down the road of determinism instead. Who is to say what determines the quality of choices people make? Does one's upbringing, circumstance, and genetics not determine the quality of one's mind and therefore whether or not they will make good choices in life? I don't understand how we can meaningfully distinguish between "things that happen to you" and "things you do" if the set of "things that happen to you" includes things like being born to specific people in a specific time and place. Surely every decision you make happens in your brain and your brain is shaped by things beyond your control.
Maybe this is an unprovable position, but it does lead me to think that for any individual, making a poor choice isn't really "their" fault in any strong sense.
This is a great question. One of the hardest lessons I've learned is that some people don't know that the choices they're making are going to hurt them.
There are children who are actively taught by the people they should be able to trust that belligerence, lying, and stealing will get them what they need in life. On the other side of the coin, there are children who are taught to assume that everyone else has the up-bringing and or at least the natural intelligence needed to enable good choices every time a moral dilemma is presented. Both - it turns out - are equally short-sighted.
What's worse is that many of us assume that others can easily change their entire worldview on a dime. In the middle of my life, I'm coming to accept that I need more years that will be available to me to fix all the broken parts of my psyche and intellect.
Overall I agree with this comment. A determinist would take this position even further and argue that there is nothing left that we could be in control of - it is causes and effects and maybe some randomness all the way down. Even those things we think are our free choices.
Yes, that’s the ultimate argument against determinism. Either one actually sincerely believe in determinism and trying to convince someone else they are wrong about free-will are just displaying their inability to take their hypothesis to its full conclusion, or they are just trying to dispel their own doubts by bending other people opinions.
The bigger picture is though that taking swings every day also requires a bit of "luck". Some people just don't have the energy, education, mindset, or environment.
It's easy to assume it would be in our control, but if you're just tired all day every day because, say, your hormone balance is off and no one can tell you why, you might statistically accomplish less than others.
I like the concept of "luck surface area". Sure, I started out with a bunch of luck. But the harder I work, the luckier I get. You have to put yourself into a position to cash in on your luck.
I agree. But there's different ways to respond to it. You can be fatalistic and say well I wasn't born rich or I'm no good at XYZ so why bother. Or you can do well and then say it wasn't luck I work hard every day. To me having had some people I've known a long time die or be debilitated by desease in recent years, I feel very lucky just to be alive and healthy with opportunities in front of me and people I love close to me. A lot of people don't have that and it's not their fault.
> Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity
I know that quote is reductive, but I do find it is relevant to my life and what I observe in others. The opportunity part is what we usually call luck. Preparation is another matter, though. Many people just aren't prepared to take advantage of situations which present to them.
I'm lucky. I'm lucky because I didn't ever have to try hard at anything in my life, and I have a good life.
I was born from two parents that cared about me. Luck
In a country where most people have a decent shot at life. Luck
I'm lazy, but I was granted a body that never failed me, and was pushed by people around me to try stuff. Luck
I'm lazy, but my laziness is somehow useful in this computer driven world. Luck
All this luck compounds, and thanks to the activities I was pushed to do, the schools I was pushed to go to, I was lucky to meet great friends, an amazing girlfriend, and have a cushy job, a nice house in a beautiful place. Luck. Luck. Luck. Luck
I have no ambition, I was never prepared for anything, but all I've had was luck.
That's what you call luck, and a lot of people try to convince themselves everything good that happens to them is because they somehow deserve it. Because they were "ambitious" and "prepared", and an "opportunity" struck at the right time, and obviously they seized it, and everyone that didn't just didn't deserve it as much as them.
Obviously some people weren't as lucky as me, and actually had to work hard, and managed to seize an actual opportunity that wasn't gifted to them. But that's not all luck, only a little part is. And those people are quite rare.
Guess the child born into abject poverty in a war-torn country in sub-Saharan Africa who died before their 5th birthday due to malnutrition and disease just didn't properly prepare or have enough ambition then right?
Classic survivorship bias BS.
The privileged always think the people on top got their through their hard work and ambition, and those on the bottom just lacked the strength of character to succeed and give no consideration whatsoever to the structural / systemic conditions created by those on top to ensure they remain there, and no consideration paid to how said conditions disproportionately negatively impact those on the bottom.
Must be nice to sit all the way up there on high and look down on the world with such a smug sense of superiority.
Between pure "luck" and personal struggle during a lifetime there lies a whole lot of dexterities that psychology, evolution and education cannot decide if they are developed due to luck or struggle. Like intelligence, intuition, talent, self confidence etc. And this fuzzy grey zone is the majority of our basis.
"Luck" is just a subjective view of statistics. We can't change past events but we can often make choices that will pay off over time. So one can in effect build their own luck by leveraging whatever they start with.
It doesn't guarantee anything, you can still be smart and fucked. But you can _try_ to change things.
I think that in a sense, there is a skill to being lucky. You may have exactly the same opportunities as another person but you may have more capacity to take advantage of those opportunities due to being open minded, adaptable, giving, and curious. I call that lucky.
There are many positively skewed coin flips as well which we don't take because of various biases, fears, habits or our upbringing.
I like a quote from Magnus Carlsen (the chess player): "The correct mindset in chess is somewhere between optimist and delusional". I think it applies to life as well.
I am naturally pessimistic I think I lost a lot of opportunities because of it. Thankfully I also get those periods where I am blindly all-in on something. Some of those made me very good at useless things but some resulted in very good opportunities and then outcomes.
Energetic optimists who avoid very dumb choices do very well in life in my experience.
People who talk about luck a lot usually can't produce a decently long list of things they tried or keep making blunders (smoking, alcohol, associating with destructive and apathetic people).
An even more outsized role is played by a virtuous life. It may not make you a billionaire, but if you finish high school, get a full-time job once you finish school, get married before you have children, then you are quite likely to have a good life.
We are doing a disservice to our fellow man by not telling them this truth.
To take one of your examples, high school graduation rates vary from ~25% to ~98% in U.S. school districts. It's not because some districts have a lot more virtuous young people, but because some districts are poor and others are wealthy, among other factors. Even if one of those factors is virtuous parents, kids can't choose their parents.
I'm not denying our moral agency, but it is often constrained by environment. Some people are lucky enough that virtuous choices are easier for them.
People in all western countries can do all of these things without much difficulty. We can go off the theory that you are just as likely to have a successful life if you drop out of school, have children with many women and/or absent fathers, and not get a permanent job — but there is no data to support any of those claims, and we have been running this experiment for decades now with nothing getting better.
How are then countries which are poorer than the USA ranking higher in education?
I completely reject the notion that wealth is at all a factor in the intelligence or educational success of a child. Wealth is just a correlation. Neither does national educational systems or policies have more than a tiny effect on education success.
What matters for educational success is the genetical and cultural material of the children. If they are born smart, or are brought up in families who value intelligence or brought up in cultures which value intelligence. Even poverty and schooling become small factors if the child has any of these foundations.
No, but a few of those poor kids see the claim change their life instead of following their parents examples and those kids tend to do well. We see this most in immigrants where the parents come with nothing and barely get by but their kids despite going to the same bad schools do well
Adsolutely. I agree that our lives aren't determined by family background, and we can draw on many other resources, both within ourselves and from other people besides family.
If I overstated my point, it's only because I was pushing back against the idea that education, employment, and a traditional family are equally attainable by all, and if someone has failed in any of these areas, it's because they lack virtue compared to other people (many of whom had more advantageous starting points in life, but supposedly that doesn't matter).
Or in simpler terms, "poor people are poor because they're bad and they deserve it". It's a sentiment that's been very useful for the ultra-wealthy class, and detrimental to everyone else, not just the poor.
Education, employment, and traditional family are useful things to work with though. They give a direction to try to get the poor to go. We can ask questions on how we can get their kids to go to school and study. We can ask questions about how we can get them acceptable jobs. We can ask how we can get them into stable family situations. We will fail a lot, but it gives us a proven framework to work towards. Yes there are problems - I'm not advocating live with a spouse who abuses you - but we can ask how we can stop that abuse as well.
Now there are many traditions around the world that works. Most cultures have man+women=family (as opposed to some form of polygamy), and there is reason to suspect this is important even if it isn't "in" to study why. (it isn't clear which non-traditional forms also would be fine and which would be a disaster)
Saying "poor are poor because they deserve it" is an accusation that I hear a lot more than I hear people who believe it. Some do believe it, but most accused of it do not and have better explinations of why they do things that the accusers don't like.
I agree that these are useful frameworks. When I said they're not equally attainable by all, I meant that for people who are better off, these things can sort of just fall in their lap, whereas poor people more often have to struggle for them. I know I'm saying something that is common sense, but I just wanted to make the point that inspiring people to be more virtuous is great, but a lot of people face material and psychological obstacles which make attaining these things "without much difficulty" (quoting the parent commenter) not very realistic. I think we agree there.
Not many people would openly say that poor people deserve to be poor. Those aren't the words that the parent commenter used, and maybe that wasn't even the intention. But this line of thinking can encourage people who feel this way, by giving their feelings a moral justification.
All I mean is, we should be empathetic toward people who have fewer resources than we do, and not be too quick to credit our accomplishments to our virtuous living.
Nope. Statistically, having children before you get married is much more likely to result in worse outcomes. Maybe cause and effect is inverted, but maybe the better option is to not run a social experiment in fatherless children as we have been doing for the past couple of decades with absolutely no research to suggest that it can result in positive outcomes and loads of data to show that it's almost definitely can't result in positive outcomes.
Statistics without context can be misleading. It’s reasonable to assume that the cause is the prior situation which lead to it, not the act itself.
Picture two scenarios:
1. A loving unmarried couple, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, or child bearing, lives in an affluent neighbourhood, in a rich country, have steady incomes, and decide to have a child. After ten years they decide “I love you so much. I don’t need a piece of paper to prove that, but let’s get married. It’ll be a great opportunity to connect our friends and family, and it’ll give us some legal and financial protection when one of us dies”.
2. In a poor neighbourhood, a woman who was mistreated all her life marries her high school sweetheart, who turn out to be abusive. He not only beats her, he rapes her regularly. Like too many victims of domestic violence, she’s afraid to move away. Eventually she becomes pregnant and has the child against her will.
Which of those do would produce the better outcome?
Being fatherless isn’t in itself the issue, but everything which came before to reach that point might be. There is a huge difference between not having a father because he abandoned you, or because he died, or because your mother as a single affluent woman with the means to do so decided to do in-vitro fertilisation.
I highly recommend “New Family Values”, by Andrew Solomon, to get a feeling for the different types of families which work. It goes way beyond “one mother, one father, married”.
Proof by analogy is fraud" - Bjarne Stroustrup
Yes; page 692 of TC++PL. A good analogy is an excellent way of illustrating an idea, but far too often such analogies are not accompanied by solid reasoning, data, etc
Analogies are seldom perfect but they are often useful. They help to illustrate a point. The world is not a programming language and most things can’t be ascertained by mathematical proofs.
But all that is irrelevant because what I posted above wasn’t an analogy. It was… A thought experiment? A purposefully exaggerated example? Anyway, not an analogy. Analogies compare two different things via a third thing they have in common, but here I used examples which are directly related to the subject matter. The point was to make it clear, via extreme but realistic examples, that correlation does not imply causation.
Those are just statistics describing what happens, not why it happens. Why does having children before getting married creates worse outcomes? Can individuals or society do something about the qualitative aspect of it?
Quantifying something doesn't explain it, it just... Quantifies it, deeper inspection is needed to understand what the statistics says.
You are prescribing what needs to be done based on something that is, ultimately, descriptive.
Do we have any data whatsoever that would support the claim that whether you are married before having children has no impact on your life outcome or the life outcomes of your children?
I don't think you understood my comment, I will spell it out: data by itself just quantifies, doesn't qualify. It doesn't qualify why marrying before having children is better, it just states that, for some reason, the outcomes are better.
Now you need to do the qualitative research to understand what are the causes for it, it could be that marriage is a signal for stable relationships, in that case marrying doesn't matter but a stable relationship does (which is quite self-obvious, it's just an example). Marriage could also have tax implications in some countries, which in turn could help the average to better outcomes, so on and so forth.
The data on this is enveloping much more than just "marriage" as a virtue, or any other moral aspect of it, you are using the data to imply that marriage is virtuous and is the cause for better outcomes which doesn't hold by just quantification...
It's blindness by statistics, it's quite common when ascribing data as the sole truth. Data can guide you to investigate other aspects that will qualify why the data shows what it shows.
These things I named correlate to better outcomes, we have nothing that indicates that not doing these things generate similar favourable outcomes … but we should continue to tell people that it's not necessary for them to do these things to have good outcomes as we have not done enough qualitative research to know what almost all of our forefathers have known, and it's best that people experiment more and see if maybe the right combination of unemployment, promiscuity and lack of education could not create equally good outcomes for them.
I have unfortunately not spent enough time at a university to follow this line of reasoning. Must be wild to be able to follow it. I'm of the yokel type that thinks if all data and tradition we have shows something works, then it's probably best to do the thing that works instead of trying things that we have no reason to think would work.
But in line with tradition, the underclasses in the west has always been the favourite laboratory for the cultural elites in the west.
> These things I named correlate to better outcomes, we have nothing that indicates that not doing these things generate similar favourable outcomes
Exactly, they correlate but there's nothing saying that just because traditionally it has correlated it means that getting married is the reason for it.
Traditionally only marriage was accepted as the means to form a family, even up to this day people will be shunned by their families for having kids out of wedlock, even in a loving relationship, don't you think being shunned by grandparents would also cause worse outcomes? Considering that some of these being shunned are also of younger age, less support from family members would mean worse outcomes.
Your data doesn't even discriminate about age groups, it's a blanket statement "marriage leads to better outcomes", leading to the question (which you could find data for): which groups? Are there other parameters/aspects that lead to better outcomes which are correlating with marriage rates? What about marriage exactly is causing better outcomes? It's not marriage itself since a lot of marriages end in divorce or an unhealthy home environment, so what is it?
Those are the insights that data can lead you into. Your take is just to do whatever has been done because it's been working, without even questioning why it might work, and what can be done to lead to better outcomes without requiring marriage.
> but we should continue to tell people that it's not necessary for them to do these things to have good outcomes as we have not done enough qualitative research to know what almost all of our forefathers have known, and it's best that people experiment more and see if maybe the right combination of unemployment, promiscuity and lack of education could not create equally good outcomes for them.
This is just moral grandstanding without substance, the world changes, traditions change (the tradition of marriage used to be about property, changing ownership of a woman from her father to her husband, for example), just blind belief in traditions is, at best, ignorant, and at worst produces this bigoted worldview.
You'd do much better if you believed in traditions while also questioning the "whys" behind it, at least to understand better why some tradition you believe might have created better outcomes, and how those processes can be applied outside of your tradition.
That is, if you are a good person and want everyone else to also have a better life even if living outside of what your view of morality is, and not only living life the way your morality prescribes to because that's, supposedly, the only way.
I don't think you need to run any experiment. Being married or not is just signing a paper. What matters is if the couple live together and in harmony. You can do so without being married and having children, and it's everyday more common.
That's why I'm saying you have cause and effect in the wrong order: children issues are tied to one or both parents not caring about them, and a symptom of that was having children before marriage, when marriage was "the only way" to a family. Nowadays things are different, and you can totally be a functional family without signing any contract on paper.
If we ignore almost all of human history save for the past 50 years, then yes. If we redefine marriage to not mean what most humans that have ever used the word meant by it, then yes.
But why would we do these things? If you call all relations between two human beings marriage, you gain nothing, you just lose a word.
Marriage is a covenant between two people, a man and a woman, with God, and incidentally, this covenant, not a piece of paper, it's also a precondition for two people to live together and in harmony. It's a commitment by both people to focus not on themselves, but on the family unit and the wellbeing of that family unit.
> You can do so without being married and having children, and it's everyday more common.
Children of married parents still have better outcomes, and the lower income people are, the bigger the advantage of having married parents are.
I'm married to my wife. We lived together happily for more than a decade before we married. We are childless atheists in a neighborhood of other childless, atheist, married couples, some of whom have been together almost as long as my wife and I have been alive.
By your definition, are we all unmarried or living in disharmony?
> By your definition, are we all unmarried or living in disharmony?
If we consider what the word meant up until about 50 years ago, then yes. If we consider the new definition, of "you signed a piece of paper given to you by the government, and gave it back to the government". Then, sure, you are married.
I'm not trying to insult you or denigrate you, but again, if we use the word marriage for all relations between two human beings, then we gain nothing, we just lose a word.
I disagree; we have gained the ability to understand how different sorts want to share their lives with their families and communities.
Do you hold the same position for marriages in other traditions - for example, Shintoism, indigenous belief systems, Hinduism, paganism, etc? Many such religions don't have the same concept of a marriage as a covenant with God, yet have existed for quite some time.
No one is suggesting marriage means "all relations between two human beings". Only that there are many ways to demonstrate and be committed to a person. The legal recognization by a church or government is one version, but not the key ingredient.
> And we don't need to use the word marriage for all of them.
But that's the only word we have for "lifetime-committed couple recognized by some authority". The meanings of words change and evolve. Tough luck.
We could use the secular "civil union" for all marriages performed outside of a church. But that would be unnecessarily clunky and pointless ("I got civil union-ed this weekend, it was great!"). And then of course people married under other religious traditions would object to the use of the word "civil" so you'd have to qualify every other union accordingly - "Jewish union", "Muslim union", "Hindu union", etc. Why?
You're basically arguing against free speech. I don't understand who it's helping. If the distinction is that important to you, just spell it out when talking about your marriage ("I was married in a church"). Leave everyone else alone.
I'm religious, but I don't see it that way. When a man and a woman are faithful to each other and having a family together, then that is it: they are married.
Actions have a value which are seven thousand times more worth than words, so the covenant with God is automatic in that situation even if the people are ignorant and have never heard of God.
>the covenant with God is automatic in that situation even if the people are ignorant and have never heard of God.
Yes. That's the kind of attitude that can build toward peace & harmony, and to live & let live instead of the hate against nonuniformity often shown by the religious extremists. Whether they are Christian or anything else. Hate is hate.
When an unmarried couple is completely faithful to each other until death, regardless of any other family, there's no way the average religious marriage can compare in that regard.
Not even close, zero is still a very small number.
Statistics are pretty accurate here. With the rate of divorce and unfaithfulness so rampant in religious marriage, it's only become more of a gamble over decades and decades of direct observation and interacton.
IIRC some cultures have shunned the idea of gambling since prehistoric times.
Others have it inscribed in scriptures almost as old, but not universally adhered to by the "faithful" just yet.
>I'm advocating here for the Christian institution of marriage, not for a merge contract with government.
How strong is your commitment to this? If it's unflagging I think a lot of people can understand your disappointment then.
If you are well-acquainted enough with the USA, you are certainly aware that these have been one and the same for like . . . centuries now here.
Not just 50 years, what have you been doing about that the whole time?
Have you had any successful efforts to completely separate church & state yet, and have you even had 50 years to work on that so far?
It would be good to see a concrete sign that your advocacy is sincere.
If there's nothing so far, that is understandable, but most of us do not have 90 full years to figure this out, so no time like the present to get started.
Can you please stop flaunting your ignorant and limited worldview all over this thread? You've insulted a good 30% of humanity by now and are on track to insult the remainder, it's getting a little hard on the eyes and there are only so many links of yours that I'm prepared to flag.
I thought flaggers always hid in the shadows, but here you are out in the open. Would you please reconsider your actions? You're doing great damage to a very nice message board, and it is to no benefit for yourself.
Flagging is a powerful tool in this small duckpond. Instead of abusing it, you can use HN to learn self restraint, so that when you one day achieve power over other people in real life you have learnt not to abuse it.
To my knowledge, "marriage" has meant "a man + a woman for a lifetime" in most societies that I am aware of. (In the context of this conversation, I think the lifetime part is what the parent was talking about.) Frequently a man could have multiple marriages, but each was for a lifetime. It might be acceptable to have a mistresses outside the marriage (Rome), but the heirs came from the official wife. I'm told that the pre-Christian Irish renewed (or didn't) their marriages every year. Divorce also existed; I know that both the Romans and the Mosaic Law had divorces. But marriage was usually taken pretty seriously by all societies, especially agricultural ones, regardless of whether they were Christian. The idea that "it's just a piece of paper" seems to me to be fairly rare. Maybe the Romans had that (I think Cicero divorces his old wife for a new young one when he was old), and Jesus criticizes the Pharisees for no-fault divorces, but these seem unusual situations compared to most of history.
Not my downvote but I do usually see things going south in a traditional way more as a consequence of tradition itself of some kind, overcoming the better judgement it would have required to avoid such a fate.
And you can have an enlightened life in any one of those places - for example, the ideas laid out in the piece are abstract, and not environment specific.
All sorts of folks have lived in all sorts of places across time. Trappings and environments have varied. Attributing things to luck in and of itself is an illusion. There is nothing that is lucky or unlucky. You play the hand you are dealt.
I don't entirely disagree, however: it's a far sight easier to live a "virtuous" life if you weren't born into poverty, or with a mental illness, or in a country that is actively at war, etc. These things are all beyond our control, as are so many other things. Luck.
It's obviously always possible to make the best of bad circumstances (and make the worst of good circumstances!) but it's easier to "win" when you're dealt a good hand.
There is an idealistic fiction of "meritocracy" that doesn't really exist anywhere to varying degrees. Racism, sexism, poverty, sectarian, citizenship discrimination, lack of influential friends and family, and more biases exist and are very unlikely to ever disappear completely.
The pejorative invention of "meritocracy" is such an own goal. The answer to overcoming these adversities is to stop moaning about it and demonstrate your own merits.
Crime is basically your way of cheating the probabilities. If everyone is playing by the rules and you don’t, you basically made your odds better. I am not saying this is right. I am just saying this is why people deviate and commit crimes though crimes are also committed for different reasons.
That’s true to an extent, but has severe limitations. Of the five thing your parent comment listed (parents, genetics, geography, society, wider economy), only one (geography) is truly under your control, and even then it can be very hard to change depending on where you start and the other four (and more).
I object to those 5 things. Parents and genetics are one thing, but geography, society, and the wider economy are for everyone to navigate so make your own luck.
If you were born poor in a society which sees part of your genetics as undesirable or outright criminal—none of which were your choice—you’ll find yourself in very dire straits and changing your situation—heck, even knowing a better life is possible—will be extremely difficult.
It is not reasonable to tell a child sold into slavery or forced to be a soldier to “make their own luck”, that “society, and the wider economy are for everyone to navigate”. A person in the eye of storm and another in calm waters cannot navigate the same way.
People who firmly believe they above all “made their own luck” are the ones who had such a large amount of it outside their control they don’t even realise how much of it they had, like a fish unable to perceive the water.
I am not saying that it is easy or that everyone starts with the same opportunities. But you can make your own luck in any case to improve your life or at least to have a better shot at it.
If you believe that you are a victim that nothing you can do will make a diference, and therefore don't even try then you will definitely not improve your situation!
Now if you are born in poverty as an albino in Africa, orphaned at a young age, sold to slavery and then to a witchdoctor for organ trafficking are you fucked? Probably but that does not change the point. [I am pushing your reply ad absurdum to highlight that it is not a counter-argument...]
This speaks to me. So much of our life circumstances are beyond our control (parents, genetics, geography, society, wider economy, etc.) It's humbling, how much of our success or failure is influenced by pure chance.